Dell's Quad SLI , 4.26GHz, Dual Core XPS Renegade System

The most surprising announcement of the day from Dell was the limited edition Dimension XPS 600 Renegade system.

Based on Intel's Pentium Extreme Edition 955 and the nForce4 SLI X16 Intel Edition chipset, this is the first Dell that will undoubtedly outperform just about anything we've seen to date.

For starters, the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 that is used in the Renegade is unlocked and Dell increased the default clock multiplier from 13.0x (3.46GHz) up to 16.0x for a factory overclocked speed of 4.26GHz - warrantied.

To cool the dual core processor running at 4.26GHz, Dell resorted to an absolutely huge copper heatsink which you can see pictured below:

We were surprised to see that no water cooling was employed, but given that we're talking about a 65nm Presler core it's not too surprising. If Dell is able to reach 4.26GHz and warranty it, we'd expect most avid overclockers will be able to do the same with proper cooling.

As if the extremely overclocked CPU wasn't enough to begin with, NVIDIA stepped in and outfitted the system with two dual-GPU GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB cards, for a total of four GPUs running in SLI mode with 2GB of total on-board memory.

The shipping version will feature Quad-SLI, not pictured above

The system will also ship with two Western Digital 150GB 10,000RPM Raptor drives.

The icing on the cake is that each and every system features a hand painted chassis and Dell will only produce a limited number of them. No word on pricing or quantities on the system, although Dell tells us that it should be available to order sometime this quarter.

Post Your Comment

47 Comments

This design has a lot going for it. As one user suggested, kids going to college. BUT, I think that a strong argument could be made for it with small business owners.

Why?

Considering that I went through Hurricane Katrina, and literally everything (including both of my cars, my father's brand new Avalanche, both PC's) was underwater, the one thing that saved all of our records was my mother's laptop.

No one expected it to be quite the monster that it was, and even though the PC's were put up high, and bagged, they were swamped. My mom's laptop of course, went home with her.

Had we had two of these mobile PC's, I *guarantee* they would have been taken out of the building and away from the storm, and we wouldn't have to deal with waiting for insurance to settle, the inevitable depreciation involved (even though the two PC's involved in the storm were perfectly okay for our needs), and lost productivity. Backups are great and all, but let's face it, they are fallible and it can take a lot of effort to recover from two lost PCs.

Personally, if these units were available in "value" flavors without the souped up video cards, I know several folks I would recommend them to right now.

Of course, I'd want a decked out screamer for my own personal use :)! ::drool::

Funny that everyone thinks of dell for low price/cheap computers and now that profit margins have slowed they drop a 30" LCD for 2 grand that takes a "limited edition" overclocked (Overclocked by Dell...hell must be cold!) quad GPU XPS just to eke out playable framerates on the newest games. What's next?!?! Water cooling and AMD brought to you by the dell duuuude? =X Reply

Very true. Plop down an estimated 10 grand on a system like this today and it will be outdated next year or even by the end of this year (there is no way nVidia will leave Quad SLI as a Dell exclusive). People will stick them in an overclocked FX-57 (perhaps watercooled) they build themselves and save themselves a few thousand dollars (and have a higher performing system to boot). Reply

We'll leave you today with a picture of Toshiba's HD-DVD player that was sitting in Intel's booth. The player crashed when we took this picture, but other than that there was nothing particularly interesting to see here.

Aww poor DVD player is shy. Dont take pictures please! Move along, give this DVD player some breathing roomm! Reply